1 See especially Brown, Bruce Alan, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 313–326Google Scholar .

2 All of these were staged originally with music by Gluck; see Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre, 282–357. Although these prefaces bore Angiolini's name only, Calzabigi later claimed to have had an uncredited role in writing both the Don Juan Preface and the ‘Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes’ – an assertion that dance historians have taken seriously, not least because those essays are far more concise and elegant than writings indisputably by Angiolini himself. Of the three prefaces, only that to Citera assediata is in Italian; the other two are in French. None the less, in the present circumstances we will consider this early series of prefaces to be a legitimate reflection of the choreographer's aims during his tenure in Vienna. The Preface to Don Juan is reprinted in facsimile in Christoph Willibald Gluck, Sämtliche Werke, volume 2: Don Juan, Sémiramis: Ballets pantomimes von Gasparo Angiolini, ed. Richard Engländer (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1966), xxiii–xxvii. The Preface to Citera assediata, long thought lost, has been reprinted by Croll, Gerhard in ‘Traditionen – Neuansätze’: Festschrift für Anna Amalie Abert (Tutzing: Schneider, 1997), 137–144Google Scholar . The Preface to Sémiramis was published simultaneously in Milan and Vienna in January 1765; the Milan edition was issued in reprint by Toscanini, Walter (Milan: Dalle Nogare e Armenti, 1956)Google Scholar .

3 Several studies have traced this theme from its origins to the present day. These include Gross, Kenneth, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar ; Stoichita, Victor I., The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Anderson, Alison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)Google Scholar ; and Hersey, George L., Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)Google Scholar .

4 Heller, Wendy, ‘Dancing Statues and the Myth of Venice: Ancient Sculpture on the Opera Stage’, Art History 33/2 (2010), 304–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

5 See Pirrotta, Nino, ‘The Traditions of Don Juan Plays and Comic Operas’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 107/1 (1980), 60–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and Russell, Charles C., The History of the Don Juan Legend before Mozart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993)Google Scholar .

6 This work was originally published in two parts as Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul (Nuremberg: Johan Jacob Wolrab, 1716; facsimile edition, Leipzig: Peters, 1975); Part 1 has Lambranzi's preface and instructions in both German and Italian, while Part 2 contains no text other than the instructions for the individual dances, in German. This is available in English translation as New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing, trans. F. Derra de Moroda, ed. Cyril W. Beaumont (first published London, 1928, by The Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing; reprinted New York: Dance Horizons, 1966).

7 On the tradition of entr'acte dancing within Italian theatres see Hansell, Kathleen Kuzmick, ‘Opera and Ballet at the Regio Ducal Teatro of Milan, 1771–1776: A Musical and Social History’ (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1980)Google Scholar , and ‘Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera’, in History of Italian Opera, part 2: Systems, volume 5: Opera on Stage, ed. Bianconi, Lorenzo and Pestelli, Giorgio, trans. Singleton, Kate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar .

8 The steps of the belle danse were developed at the French court in the second half of the seventeenth century and codified in the dance notation system of Raoul Auger Feuillet (Choréographie ou l'art de décrire la danse par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs (Paris, 1700)).

9 The plates were created by the Nuremburg artist Johann Georg Puschner (1680–1749).

10 Lambranzi concluded by assuring his audience that ‘I have myself performed these dances in the most distinguished theatres of Germany, Italy and France, and they are nearly all my own compositions’ (‘questi Balli io stesso li ho rapresentati sopra li principali Theatri in Germania, in Italia, e Francia e sono magior Parte di mia propria Inventione’); Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul, Part 1, 1. One can read in detail about commedia-inflected steps in a treatise by one of the century's most prominent grotteschi, Gennaro Magri: Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo (Naples, 1779). This treatise is the subject of The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World, ed. Brown, Bruce Alan and Harris-Warrick, Rebecca (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)Google Scholar .

11 Lambranzi, Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul, Part 1, 1.

12 Both of these are reproduced in Heller, ‘Dancing Statues and the Myth of Venice’, 306–307. For both of these numbers Lambranzi supplied what dance historians describe as ‘character pieces’: tunes in binary form that lack traditional dance indices, supplying pictorial or characteristic figures instead. The tune accompanying plates 12 to 17 in Part 2 is notable for its rhythmic irregularity and for the closeness with which its musical content can be matched to the animation of the statues.

13 The Preface supplies instructions in Italian: ‘All’aperto del Theatro si rappresenta questa bella statua immobile infino che la prima parte d'Aria sarà suonata e con la repetitione salta il Scaramuzza dal Piedistale, e fà li suoi belli passi alla Scaramuzza, Caprioli, e Piroletti, sin che l'Aria si suona 2 ò 3 volte alla ora si ritirá' (At the opening of the stage the dancer represents this beautiful, motionless statue until the first half of the air is sounded, and as it repeats Scaramouche jumps from the pedestal and makes his lovely Scaramouche's steps, cabrioles and pirouettes, until the air has been played two or three times, at which point he departs). Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz–Schul, Part 1, 2. The instructions given in German at the bottom of plate 24 differ from the Italian preface in a few details relating to the end of the dance: ‘nach 3. mahl gespielter Aria hat der tantz ein ende’ (after the air has been played three times the dance comes to an end).

14 On the nations represented within Lambranzi's treatise see Heartz, Daniel, ‘A Venetian Dancing Master Teaches the Forlana: Lambranzi's Balli Teatrali’, Journal of Musicology 17/1 (1999), 136–151CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

15 Winter, Marian Hannah, The Pre-Romantic Ballet (London: Pittman, 1974), 13Google Scholar .

16 See, for instance, Hornsby, Clare, ed., The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond (London: British School of Rome, 2000)Google Scholar .

17 Winter wrote that ‘the improvised Italian Comedy provided the background for action ballet in whatever tentative forms it is manifest, and in whichever country it occurs’; The Pre-Romantic Ballet, 23.

18 Sallé was the daughter of itinerant acrobats and began her career as a performer in fairground theatres; her teacher in England, John Rich, was one of the century's most famous Harlequins, and also performed snippets from the Metamorphoses. See Dacier, Émile, Une danseuse de l'Opéra sous Louis XV: Mlle Sallé (1707–1756) d'après des documents inédits (Paris: Plon, 1909)Google Scholar , and McCleave, Sarah, ‘Marie Sallé, a Wise Professional Woman of Influence’, in Women's Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800, ed. Brooks, Lynn Matluck (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 160–182Google Scholar , especially 173–174.

19 The music is by Jean-Joseph Mouret and has recently been reconstructed from a reduced score by Rebecca Harris-Warrick.

20 Quotation is from Moore, Lillian, Artists of the Dance (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1938), 30–31Google Scholar . See also Kirstein, Lincoln, Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks (New York: Praeger, 1970), 106–107Google Scholar .

21 de Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, Traité des sensations, à Madame la Comtesse de Vassé, par M. l'Abbé de Condillac (Paris: Bure, 1754)Google Scholar ; English translation, Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Carr, Geraldine (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1930)Google Scholar . English quotations are from this translation. It is rarely noted that this was not the first time a philosopher had described the human body as a moving statue: no less a figure than René Descartes wrote in the Treatise on Man, ‘I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us’. For Descartes, though, the image of the statue-machine served to indicate the alienness of the human body: he described non-human animals in the same terms. See, for instance, Baker, Gordon and Morris, Katherine, Descartes' Dualism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36Google Scholar .

22 Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, 75.

23 Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, 89.

24 See, for instance, Jütte, Robert, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. Lynn, James (Cambridge: Polity, 2004)Google Scholar , and Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

25 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Paris: Mariette, 1719)Google Scholar . Sophia Rosenfeld has traced eighteenth-century French theories of language to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690): Rosenfeld, , A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 17–27Google Scholar .

26 Condillac and Diderot were greatly influenced by the experiments of English surgeon William Cheselden (1688–1752) on a blind man granted sight for the first time. See Jütte, A History of the Senses, 133.

27 de Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines: ouvrage où l'on réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l'entendement humain (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1746Google Scholar ). The Essai made similar use of a thought experiment, demonstrating the gradual formation of the ‘langage d’action' between a wild boy and girl.

28 Condillac briefly interrupted his discussion of the statue towards the end of the Traité des sensations when he described a wild boy recently discovered in the forests of Lithuania; the reader was encouraged to understand the boy's behaviour with the animated statue as a frame of reference.

29 On the influence of Condillac's Traité on early nineteenth-century literary and musical discourses see Blasius, Leslie David, ‘The Mechanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Romantic Musical Experience’, in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Bent, Ian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–24Google Scholar . The Traité is also discussed in Stephen Rumph, ‘The Sense of Touch in Mozart's Don Giovanni’, Music and Letters 88/4 (2007), 561–588.

30 Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, xxxvii.

31 Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language, 57–85.

32 Angiolini, Don Juan, xxvi–xxvii.

33 Angiolini, Citera assediata, 141–142.

34 See, for instance, Gérard Genette, Mimologics, trans. Morgan, Thaïs E. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995Google Scholar ; originally published in 1970 as Mimologiques: voyage en Cratylie), 65–90.

35 Marazzini, Claudio, ‘Le teorie’, in Storia della lingua italiana, volume 1: I luoghi della codificazione, ed. Serianni, Luca and Trifone, Pietro (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 291–299Google Scholar .

36 The terms of this debate were established at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the dispute between Dominique Bouhours and Giovan Giuseppe Orsi; see Viscardi, Antonio, ‘Il problema della costruzione nelle polemiche linguistiche del settecento’, Paideia 2 (1947), 193–214Google Scholar .

37 Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, L'art d'écrire (Geneva; Avignon, 1789), quoted in Alfredo Schiaffini, ‘Aspetti della crisi linguistica italiana del settecento’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 57/2–4 (1937), 275–295.

38 Schiaffini, ‘Aspetti della crisi linguistica italiana del settecento’, 276.

39 Marazzini, ‘Le teorie,’ 294.

40 In 1766, while the choreographer was working in St Petersburg, Angiolini wrote to Beccaria of his admiration for the latter's anti-torture tract Dei delitti e delle pene, which achieved immediate and long-lasting fame throughout Europe. He wrote, ‘it has been sixty years since anything has had such an effect. Thanks to philosophy and to those illuminated spirits who, in the face of prejudice, fanaticism, despotism and barbarous laws, know and have the courage to teach the road of justice, of sweetness, of humanity’. Quoted in Lorenzo Tozzi's biography of the choreographer, Il balletto pantomimo del settecento: Gaspare Angiolini (L'Aquila: Japadre, 1972), 129–130. My translation.

41 Alessandro Verri, ‘Rinunzia avanti notaio degli autori del presente foglio al vocabolario della Crusca’, Il Caffè 1/4 (1764). The entirety of the Caffè has been reissued recently in a modern edition as ‘Il Caffè’ 1764–1766, ed. Gianni Francioni and Sergio Romagnoli (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993). In this volume the ‘Rinunzia’ occupies pages 47–50. Subsequent references to articles in Il Caffè will refer to titles, authors and page numbers in this edition. All translations from Il Caffè are mine.

42 The activities of this circle have received their most thorough documentation in Franco Venturi's six-volume history of eighteenth-century Italy, Settecento riformatore (Turin: Einaudi, 1967–1990). See in particular ‘Gli uomini delle riforme: la Lombardia’, in volume 5: L'Italia dei lumi (1764–1790), 425–834.

43 The six-volume fourth edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca (1729–1738) reversed the mild modernization in matters technical and extra-literary of the third edition (1691). Valle, Valeria della, ‘La lessicografia’ in Storia della lingua italiana, volume 1: I luoghi della codificazione, 55–63Google Scholar .

44 In an oft-quoted letter to a publisher, Pietro Verri lamented the suppression of one of his Gallic coinages: ‘out of fear of the new verb regrettare you wanted to substitute compiangere; you thus denied an idea because there is no corresponding word in our language, instead of giving citizenship to a French word that renders the idea perfectly’. Quoted in Tina Matarrese, Storia della lingua italiana: il settecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 52. My translation.

45 Quoted in Venturi, L'Italia dei lumi, 438.

46 See, for instance, Marazzini, ‘Le teorie’, 298.

47 Alessandro Verri, ‘Rinunzia’, 47–48.

48 Alessandro Verri, ‘Rinunzia’, 48.

49 [Alessandro Verri, on Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des sensations,] ‘Dei difetti della letteratura e di alcune loro cagioni’, Il Caffè, 540.

50 Cesare Beccaria, ‘Risposta alla Rinunzia’, Il Caffè, 104.

51 Beccaria, ‘Risposta alla Rinunzia’, 105.

52 Beccaria, ‘Risposta alla Rinunzia’, 105–106.

53 Pietro Verri, ‘Pensieri sullo spirito della letteratura d’Italia', Il Caffè 1/19, 211–222.

54 (Bitter love lashes and constrains me ever / To serve, to slave for false faith; / Merciless woman does not believe my injuries, / She wounds and enrages me, and fills my heart with troubles.) This is the first quatrain of a famous sonnet by the sixteenth-century poet Luigi Groto (1541–1585); quoted in Pietro Verri, ‘Pensieri sullo spirito della letteratura d’Italia', 214.

55 Pietro Verri, ‘La musica’, Il Caffè 2/8, 487–494.

56 Pietro Verri, ‘La musica’, 489.

57 Pietro Verri, Estratto della letteratura europea I (1767), 15; quoted in Venturi, ‘Gli uomini delle riforme: la Lombardia’, 437.

58 Pietro Verri, ‘La musica’, 488–489.

59 Pietro Verri, ‘La musica’, 490.

60 Pietro Verri, ‘La musica’, 491–492.

61 The Lettere a Monsieur Noverre have been reprinted in Il ballo pantomimo: lettere, saggi e libelli sulla danza (1773–1785), ed. Lombardi, Carmela (Turin: Paravia, 1998), 49–88Google Scholar . The letters attacked the French choreographer on several points, and contested his claim of having invented modern pantomime. They were followed by Angiolini's Riflessioni sopra l'uso dei programmi nei balli pantomimi (1775), reprinted in Il ballo pantomimo, 117–123. The quarrel is too well known to merit rehearsal here. For the most thorough recent account, also of the subsequent Milanese pamphlet war debating the relative merits of Angiolini and Noverre, see Hansell, ‘Opera and Ballet’, 766–920.

62 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 51–52.

63 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 70, 75.

64 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 61.

65 Gasparo Angiolini, Don Juan, xxv.

66 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 61.

67 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 83.

68 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 83.

69 Angiolini, Riflessioni sopra l'uso dei programmi nei balli pantomimi, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 121.

70 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 53.

71 Hansell, ‘Opera and Ballet’, 793.

72 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 84.

73 Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 71.

74 This was consistent with Rousseau's view of ballet in his Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Duchesne, 1768), 37–38.

75 Angiolini, Riflessioni sopra l'uso dei programmi, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 118.

76 Angiolini, Riflessioni sopra l'uso dei programmi, reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 122.

77 Gazzetta letteraria 7 (16 February 1774), 4; quoted in Hansell, ‘Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera’, 234.

78 See Sara Rosini, ‘Scritti sul balletto: Nota introduttiva’, in the Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Verri, volume 3: I ‘Discorsi’ e altri scritti degli anni settanti, ed. Giorgio Panizza (Rome: Edizione di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 597–621. This essay includes lengthy quotations from Pietro's letters to Alessandro on the pantomime, which both prefigured and elaborated upon his ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’. The ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’ appears in I ‘Discorsi’ e altri scritti, 623–653.

79 This new turn in Verri's thought, announced in the Idee sull'indole del piacere of 1773, occurred simultaneously with Angiolini's arrival in Milan.

80 Pietro Verri, ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’, reprinted in I ‘Discorsi’ e altri scritti, ed. Panizza, 627.

81 Quoted in Rosini, ‘Nota introduttiva’, 614.

82 Pietro Verri, ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’, reprinted in I ‘Discorsi’ e altri scritti, ed. Panizza, 633.

83 Pietro Verri, ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’, reprinted in I ‘Discorsi’ e altri scritti, ed. Panizza, 634.

84 Pietro Verri, ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’, reprinted in I ‘Discorsi’ e altri scritti, ed. Panizza, 634.

85 Pietro Verri, ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’, reprinted in I ‘Discorsi’ e altri scritti, ed. Panizza, 626.

86 Pietro Verri, ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’, reprinted in I ‘Discorsi’ e altri scritti, ed. Panizza, 628.

87 Quoted in Rosini, ‘Nota introduttiva’, 621.

88 The Osservazioni sulla tortura was completed in 1777 but not published until seven years after its author's death, as a supplement to Verri's Memorie storiche sulla economia pubblica dello stato di Milano (Milan: Destefanis, 1804), 191–312. Its account of the failure of Milan's judicial apparatus during the plague of 1630 was an important source for the Storia della colonna infame (1840) by Verri's illegitimate nephew Alessandro Manzoni.

89 Goudar, , ‘Sopra il ballo’, in Osservazioni sopra la musica ed il ballo (Venice: Palese, 1773)Google Scholar . Reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 25–47. The original is as follows: ‘Se io dovessi mettere un’inscrizione sulla porta del teatro, vi metterei Scuola pubblica, nella quale ciascuno deve instruirsi per mezzo del suo denaro' (37).

90 Borsa, , ‘Saggio filosofico sui balli pantomimi seri dell’opera', in Opuscoli scelti sulle scienze e sulle arti (Milan: Marelli, 1782)Google Scholar ; reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 209–234.

91 Although the project itself began with La vendetta spiritosa, Angiolini made his aims explicit only in the Preface to his subsequent ballet, L'amore al cimento, o Il sofì generoso, a ballo eroicomico nazionale, which had its premiere at La Scala in the autumn of 1782.

92 See the Preface to Angiolini, L'amore al cimento.

93 Angiolini's Condillac ballet was previously considered a very late work, staged in Venice in 1791. However, rare librettos at the New York Public Library show that it began its life in Milan almost a decade earlier. That La vendetta spiritosa (Milan, 1782) and La vendetta ingegnosa, o La statua di Condilliac (Venice, 1791) are in fact one and the same is confirmed by the dramatis personae provided for both ballets in their respective librettos, and by Angiolini's claims in the Preface to L'amore al cimento (Milan, 1782) of the ‘philosophical’ content of La vendetta spiritosa.

94 Angiolini, ‘Preciso del ballo’, in La vendetta ingegnosa o La statua di Condilliac.

95 The ‘magical operation’ probably occurred in Act 2, which is set during the night-time ‘in the midst of an ancient, ruined building, partly consumed by flames’ (‘Luogo ristretto nel mezzo d'una antica fabbrica diroccata, in parte confumata dalle fiamme. Una quercia antica s'erge in mezzo delle ruine. Notte con Luna’).

96 Angiolini, La vendetta spiritosa (Milan, 1782). My translation.

97 [Esteban de] Arteaga, Stefano, ‘Ragionamento sopra il ballo pantomimico’, in Rivoluzioni nel teatro musicale italiano: dalla sua origine fino al presente, second edition (Venice: Palese, 1785)Google Scholar , volume 3, 210. My translation.

98 Arteaga, ‘Ragionamento sopra il ballo pantomimico’, 231.

99 Arteaga, ‘Ragionamento sopra il ballo pantomimico’, 233.

100 Tozzi, Gaspare Angiolini, 146.

101 According to Bruce Alan Brown, Deucalione e Pirra was Angiolini's final choreography; Brown, ‘Angiolini, Gasparo’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (20 January 2010). It was staged under the direction of Giuseppe Paracca.

102 Angiolini's allegory displays what in retrospect seems like a touching literalism in the deployment of its images. In a similar vein, the choreographer erected a ‘Liberty Pole’ on his property following the entry of the French forces into Milan, ultimately earning himself two years of painful exile at the end of his life. These events are detailed in Tozzi, Gaspare Angiolini, 145–151.

103 Hansell, ‘Opera and Ballet’, 797, and ‘Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera’, 224; Brown, ‘Angiolini, Gasparo’, in Grove Music Online.

104 See, for instance, Luzzi, Joseph, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .